bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
What charitable organizations, activist groups, political entities etc. do you donate to? I'm finding that I have enough slack in the budget each month that I'd like to support some good causes. Starting off with some local orgs but keen for more ideas.
Looking for a new one to start actually. I'm about halfway through Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings, but like most of her work there's very little sense of tension and so there's not much to pull me to read it fast at all. I do usually walk away from a session with her glad that I did it, though.
Some contemporaries described Barbara Pym in the '50s as a modern Jane Austen; and I think that Jane Gardam was our latter-day Barbara Pym. I thought that Gardam's very last books, the Old Filth trilogy, were actually her best by a mile. I have only read early Pym so far, but I have some later Pym on the shelf and I'm curious how she went on to develop and if she had this same pattern.
(Update: I have just realized that Jane Gardam is in fact still alive, aged 95. I do think she's done writing though.)
I'm about 25 pages into The Beautiful and the Damned today, and possibly I'll go ahead and stick this out. Read Tender is the Night last year and it was one of the highlights of 2022 for me.
Post-hardcore. Bands like Title Fight, Drug Church, Joyce Manor, Fiddlehead. Here are some cool songs. But it's not for everyone.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I never have. I'll check it out!
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I wish we could make a Motte collaborative list or something. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I just had the realization that maybe I, a middle-class man, could be having lots of kids (a desire of mine) if I would just go meet a nice working-class girl; and that I've maybe subconsciously been trying to "date up" this whole time. I am a fool!
(This is actually not sarcasm.)
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
it's very hard to stay single in America if you're white, middle class, and not obese.
I just have a rare talent for it, lol.
In all seriousness, I am in a long romantic cold spell that temporally matches up exactly with when I started working from home permanently during Covid. I have not managed to successfully adapt my life such that I am meeting people IRL at the same rate I used to. There are lots of viable solutions to this, but my job is difficult and tiring and makes me want to stay home. I may be displaying a revealed preference here.
Still - I have indeed dated women from social strata above mine, and they did not want to settle down with me. I did not make the appropriate connection before. (Bearing in mind of course that I may just not be that cool, and they found they could genuinely do better.) Especially because I grew up in a working-class milieu myself, you would think I could get along very well with a girl I met at the local dirt track, if I would only go there myself. And I'm not looking down on people like that. It is not as though my existence in this other social class has brought me any exceptional happiness.
date outside your race
This is good advice. Perhaps this is something everyone simply already knows, but when I have done this, I have been surprised at the extent to which it feels just the same as dating within your race.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I was surprised to see in /r/dankchristianmemes, a heavily upvoted thread about wanting traditional hymns, but not wanting "conservative/far-right ideals" in the church. All the comments are about how great it is that mainline Protestant denominations are affirming of all kinds of alternative lifestyles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dankchristianmemes/comments/11i1mit/is_it_too_much_to_ask_for_both/
Honestly this really made me think. On Reddit, the gun people are leftist, the Christians are leftist, etc. etc. I spend so much time on Reddit that it makes me think leftism has literally taken over everything. Then I went to church this morning and realized there's an entire big population of people who don't use Reddit, have never heard of Reddit, and who still exist across the whole spectrum of political belief.
I need to get off of Reddit.
Yesterday I obtained a new cat. She is ten months old and very precious.
In my house, she has opted to hide either in my closet, under my bed, or under my couch the entire time. I cannot be sure she has eaten or drunk anything, though she did use the litterbox well. I am always keeping food and water available to her.
Can you advise me on how to handle this situation? Or even offer reassurance? I feel very concerned for her.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I am on a bar patio right now, reading John Ball's Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms, a novel from the 60s about an awkward American engineer who goes to Japan and gets caught up in love with a geisha.
I am still reading it so I can't comment overly much beyond that, except to say that it's written with real heart and skill, and the writer's sense of humor is amazing.
Is there anything better than a fine kölsch on a patio in the sunshine, with a nice book to read? I can't imagine.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Currently reading The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason. "Set during the British Army's Gordon Relief Expedition in Sudan, well after the formation of Mahdiyya, it tells the story of a young man accused of cowardice."
Dramatic themes and interesting characters but the writing is rather dead. This book was made into multiple movies, and it does seem like a story that would come across better on film.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
What are the places in the world today with the lowest digital penetration? Are there still any particular places you could go and see hardly any cellphones?
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
To some extent I'm also wondering if even those places, are still like that. My mental image of the situation is that even those remnants, which I've had some awareness of for a long time, are on their way to being digitized as well.
Not really a question for you in particular - I just wonder how we'd even know if that had happened.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I've always been an "I feel"er and people have often criticized me for that. Rightly, I think. I think I just have a lot of under-tested ideas. Part of it may also be poor writing; I'm not sure if writing is getting worse in a general way.
It may sound crazy but a friend of mine turned me on to Pinterest to fill the scrolly urges. Now if I have to pick up my phone, I can just look at pleasing images of Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, Anouk Aimee, and Anna Karina, or at pictures of cool old crumbling steel mills, instead of learning about the newest way the world's getting worse.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Sometimes I think about how it seems like when new TV shows are made, in America anyway, the default locations are always Los Angeles and New York. And as I understand it, the companies that make them are pretty much all based in those places.
Does it work this way in other countries? Are German television shows always based in Berlin, or in Munich? Are Italian shows always in Rome? Or do you also have studios operating out of Turin, Milan, and Florence?
It seems to me like making a television show is not such an expensive undertaking that you couldn't have more local or regional variants. Why do you not have, for instance, a Cleveland-based studio making Cleveland-set programming for the NE Ohio market? Is it not profitable? Has it been tried and failed? Is it happening and I just don't know about it?
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
My best friend is getting really into drag, and her state (Kentucky, where I also once lived) just passed laws limiting drag shows in public spaces. I hope we never talk about it, because I'm not going to lie and say I disagree with the law.
Related, but not the same admittedly. I do not currently know any trans people, although I have friends of friends that are.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Indeed not. Just a lesbian natal female with no inclination towards crossdressing, transitions, etc. as far as I've ever known. Her interest in drag is evidently only as a spectator and participant in wider LGBTQ culture.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
You know, I actually found Count Zero and other, later Gibson works very hard to deal with for specifically that reason. A friend of mine keeps trying to get me to read The Peripheral, but I spend so much time just trying to understand what is going on that I end up bailing out. I do understand the appeal I think, but a little bit more explanation than what he gives us would be welcome.
I'm nearly at the end of Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation, in which he reflects on his process and on his career. There's something about the way Murakami writes about writing, that makes you the reader think you could do it too: that while there is a minimum talent threshold, if you clear that then it's just a matter of having enough work ethic and self-reflectiveness. Perhaps that's true. But another takeaway from the work, and something which Murakami never truly addresses or reflects on, is that he obviously has a really immense work ethic himself. He drives himself quite hard, and also seems to have no interest in the kinds of distractions which are so disruptive to younger generations. To hear him tell it, he genuinely spends all of his time writing, exercising, reading, and listening to music. Good recipe for productivity if you can stick to it.
I enjoyed The Fountainhead more, because to me it seems to have less of that, and more of actual story. I actually think Rand is a pretty good storyteller and prose stylist - but she spends so little of her novels on that. I wish she had tried her hand at a romance or an adventure story. Imagine.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
I have, and I think it's quite wonderful. The feeling I got when the buildup in that book finally pays off, it still sticks with me now. I remember where I was and what time of day it was, when I read the pivotal moment in that book.
Having said that - I think South of the Border, West of the Sun and Hear the Wind Sing are the Murakami books with the most autobiographical elements. Especially the first one: the protagonist actually runs a jazz bar as Murakami did in his 20s. (Also: South of the Border, West of the Sun is my favorite novel ever, largely for personal reasons. No other novel so perfectly captured so many things that I felt at a particular time in my life.)
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Yes. It's more irritating because there have been periods of my life where I actually carved out a routine and made it happen for a while. I wrote some short stories and novellas. I even had a nonfiction piece published in a local anthology last year. I'm not truly a good writer - just look at my comments on this website for evidence of that - but when I put my mind to it, I have had genuine success.
But for some time now I've been in yet another one of those phases where my job is sucking the life out of me; in the morning I play with my cat, in the evenings I go to the gym, do chores, read, and sleep, and doing something really creative feels totally beyond me. I know I should man up and pursue my dreams, but for right now, I'll just lay down and wait to die...
I will note something that I want to act on soon. Recently I read the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer - better known today for its 1953 film adaptation, but a well-loved novel in its own right. Anyway: Schaefer, at the age of 38, started "writing fiction after hours as a way of calming down." He escaped into the world of the Old West through his writing. By doing this - he put out several very popular novels which are still remembered now. Not by struggling and grinding to the limit: he found a way of doing it which felt good, an escape which felt relaxing. Couldn't we do that, ourselves?
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Do you know of any articles or writings about the impact of this on NLP and NLP labs, or fora where they're discussing it? I'm curious to learn more about that or to hear it from them.
bolido_sentimental
1yr ago
Currently reading D.E. Stevenson's Five Windows, a bildungsroman about a young Scot making his way in post-war Britain and cultivating his gift for writing. Great so far.
Aside: I volunteer at a non-profit bookstore in my neighborhood on Saturdays. I started reading Five Windows last week, and so yesterday, I went to see if there were still some D.E. Stevenson books there. Indeed there were six or seven. I thought, "Forgotten British writer of light romances, dead for 50 years - surely those will still be there when I finish up. I'll go do my shift." Naturally, someone bought all of them while I was working. That'll teach me. But really, I'm happy to think that there's someone out there with the same taste that I have.
I finished Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates last night.
"The Northants setting becomes the background both ugly and beautiful for the story of a young girl, the daughter of a decaying aristocratic household, and her lovers, of which the most important is the narrator himself."
I thought it was brilliant honestly. The characters really mature and change over the course of the story, and the ending was so tense. Would ardently recommend to anyone who likes 75-year-old sentimental novels - it's basically Thomas Hardy but in the motor age.
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